


Magic

by merrymegtargaryen



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-01
Updated: 2016-01-01
Packaged: 2018-05-10 19:20:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5597794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/merrymegtargaryen/pseuds/merrymegtargaryen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dag's daughter notices something.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Magic

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this on tumblr for furiroad for the Mad Max Secret Santa exchange.

There is a kind of magic in the Vault.

Not like the magic in the stories her mothers tell her or the pretend magic in the books she reads. It’s a quiet sort of magic, the kind you don’t always realize is magic.

She thinks that maybe it’s because she can’t hear the way the others can. (“It isn’t that you can’t hear,” her birth mother tells her. “It’s just that you hear differently.”) She can read lips and she can sign and she can feel magic.

Her mothers are careful when they tell her about what happened in the Days Before, but she knows that bad things happened in this room. She knows about the women who lived and loved and cried and laughed and bled and died here. She thinks that maybe the magic came from them.

She doesn’t tell anyone at first because she doesn’t think they will understand. Even her mothers who survived the Fury Road, even her birth mother with her gods and her prayers and the strange things she says sometimes. They couldn’t understand. They wouldn’t.

But one night, when her heart is heavy with the secret, she tells Capable’s baby boy.

 

“There’s magic in here,” she mouths against his ear, the words spilling out as her pulse quickens. “That’s why I didn’t get hurt when I fell down the stairs. That’s why Max doesn’t have nightmares when he sleeps here. It’s why there’s always moonlight even when there’s no moon and why we always find another piece of chalk just when we think we ran out. That’s why you and me didn’t die inside our mothers like their other babies. They’re protecting us, our brothers and our sisters and our mothers’ sisters and their babies. Listen,” she says, because she can hear the magic, too. “That’s my namesake, the mother with scars on her face. She sings to you every night. Sometimes she sings to me too. Listen.”

He does, and she knows that he can hear the woman too. It’s a sad song, one that doesn’t have any words, but she carries it in her heart for a long time after that.

“What are you humming?” Capable asks her one day when she forgets to be careful.

“I don’t know,” she says truthfully, because she doesn’t, really.

“I’ve heard it before. I can’t remember where, but…I know it.”

She wonders if her namesake sings to Capable, too. She wonders if the mother with scars on her face sings to all of them. Maybe they don’t know it’s her. She remembers what her mother said—It’s not that you can’t hear, it’s just that you hear differently. Maybe she isn’t the only one to feel the magic—she just feels it differently. Maybe they can all feel it.

She starts watching her mothers. She watches the way Cheedo always knows where to find odds and ends and the way Toast never burns food even when she leaves it on the stove for too long. She watches the way Capable can fix anything you put in front of her and the way her mother can make anything grow.

“It’s the magic,” she tells Max one day without thinking.

“What magic?” he signs with a furrowed brow.

She almost doesn’t tell him, but something (she thinks it might be the magic) makes the words form in her hands. She tells him about the magic, how it happens and why. She tells him about the singing, and the look on his face tells her that he’s heard it too.

“What makes you think it’s magic?” he asks her.

She considers this for a long moment. “What else would it be?”

Max thinks about it too, and then he laughs.

 

When they talk about Men, when they talk about Him, when they talk about the Days Before, the women say, “Who killed the world?” They paint it on the walls, ink it into their skin. She has heard it her whole life.

“Where there is death,” her mother tells her, brushing the soil from a budding sprout, “There is also life. They killed the world, but we can make it live again.”

Life, she thinks, watching the promise of something green, is its own kind of magic.


End file.
